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breaking news

Post Moved From Clematis To Datura

Readers: You’d think one thing we could get agreement on is our own company!

Our July 2 column, about the 40th anniversary of Cox buying The Palm Beach Post, said the newspaper moved in 1923 from Datura Street to Clematis Street. Our source for that was an article that appeared when the Post opened its new building in 1995. But about a half dozen pioneers wrote and called to say we were wrong! They say it was the other way around; it started on Clematis, moved to Datura, and went from there to Dixie Highway near Belvedere Road.

John Rogers, now of Boynton Beach, a retired Florida Power & Light Co. engineer who’s now 81, said he was a teenage delivery boy in the mid-1940s and clearly recalls picking up papers at the Post’s headquarters on Datura.

“There was a diner right next door. We’d get a cup of coffee and a doughnut before we started delivering papers,” Rogers said.

Longtime reader Jim Anderson, of Anderson’s Classic Hardware, wrote, “the Datura location was roughly across the street from Halsey & Griffith — maybe a bit west of that. The press room was on the ground-floor, which was slightly below the level of the sidewalk, I remember standing outside, hypnotized, watching the papers being printed, cut and going up, over and out-of-sight, to another part of the building, where they were bundled and packaged for distribution.”

And Virginia Lilly of West Palm Beach, born in 1924, called to say, “My dad worked at Cater’s Furniture across the street. I remember seeing some of the presses, or hearing it, walking downtown, and the hurricane flag flying over the building.”

Update: We couldn’t resist one more Woolworth’s memory, this from Margaret Jarriel Scott Branch of Jensen Beach. She was a Conniston Junior High student, on a worker’s permit, when she started working at the Clematis Street store in downtown West Palm Beach in 1945.

“During my 13 years there, I worked on almost every counter,” she writes.

Palm Beach Post file photo: The former Palm Beach Post/Times building on Datura Street in West Palm Beach is being demolished in this undated photo. The sign in front from Big Chief wrecking company says ‘We wreck anything under the sun.’

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